Collins’ second and third novels were Dick Tracy Goes to War (1991) and Dick Tracy Meets His Match (1992). Where the film novelization was set vaguely in the Depression-era 1930's, and Goes to War took place in late 1942 and Meets His Match was set late 1949. Over the past week I read Dick Tracy Goes to War and essentially an original novel, it utilized plot elements and characters from several different wartime storylines in the newspaper strip. Like the previous novel and the film from which it derived, Goes to War pits Dick Tracy against a coalition of many different foes, rather than just one or two.
Dick Tracy is eager to serve his country in any way he can. But Lieutenant Commander Tracy of Naval Intelligence was needed on the home front, where a wave of wartime racketeering had the city in a deadly grip. As gangsters B-B Eyes, The Mole and the quivering confidence man Shaky try to bleed the city dry, Dick Tracy rushes into battle with his tommy gun blazing. Yet between the town’s toughest gangsters and a slinky seductress named Black Pearl, the crime-stopping hero found himself distracted from the real danger: foreign agents who were zeroing in on a top-secret weapon that could destroy the country.
Max Allan Collins has said that he considers this book his best Dick Tracy work in any medium, and one of his best novels overall. Because it was not a novelization of a pre-existing screenplay and had nothing directly to do with the strip itself, Collins received little editorial interference from Disney Studios and Tribune Media Services, giving him a level of freedom he did not have on any previous Dick Tracy project.
As a fan of the Dick Tracy comic strip, I found this novel to be above average and highly recommended. Worth seeking out if you want a good read.
